[danaris]

Of course you can't. Post-scarcity is a new thing; you can't go to societies of the past and see its effects.

But you act as though adding any features to our society and economy that move toward taking better care of all our people would somehow ruin the whole thing.

Now, to answer your initial question:

Provide governmental support for small businesses during the transition—local grocery stores, small family farms; not the ones already making hundreds of millions+ in profit every year. A lot of this support wouldn't even need to be monetary—remember, this isn't even talking about making food free or anything; it's just talking about moving to a non-profit model. The most obvious type of assistance is legal (to understand what being a non-profit means and how to legally go about making those changes) and accounting (to understand what this will mean for their books).

I don't believe that massive chain supermarkets and agribusiness conglomerates should get much in the way of financial support for this kind of change—they've already been making huge amounts of money for their execs and shareholders. And, again, only one of those groups actually has to stop making money off this. While I would 100% support separate measures to reduce the exec pay disparity, that's out of scope for this particular discussion. Going non-profit just means you don't have shareholders who get to make money off the business—and, vitally, you don't have shareholders pushing the business to make more profit at the expense of pricing people out of staples or reducing the quality of the food.